"Critical" projects and volunteer maintainers

> You could even set it up so the amount the maintainer received was related to their promised service level.

Isn't this kind of model opening up the "tip jar" operator to some level of responsibility for actually /tracking/ the responsiveness of projects? Quite apart from raising questions of where the money goes to, as well as probably a whole host of other questions and challenges that are probably going to make it all horribly impractical.

Running something like this really doesn't seem like it would be viable for any but the largest and most well resourced archive maintainers, or for many other organisations that might be interested in supporting maintainers and developers. And the organisations that /could/ do it might not be ones that the community would trust very much with such a role, like Google or Microsoft (or even Mozilla or the FSF).

Clearly /something/ needs to be done to ensure better resourcing for open source maintainers and developers, but I'm not sure this model would be very practically useful.